NASA’s climate supercomputer is getting a huge upgrade

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Our climate models are about to get a lot more detailed. NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) announced it’s almost tripling the peak performance of its Discover supercomputer, to more than 3.3 petaflops — or to be more specific, 3.361 trillion floating-point operations per second — thanks to an upgrade courtesy of SGI Rackable hardware. The upgrade will come as three Scalable Compute Units (SCUs) employing 14-core Intel E5-2697v3 (Haswell) processors. The three SCUs together will result in a total of 64,512 processor cores, each with over 4GB RAM. The biggest of the three SCUs, the SCU-10, has 138 terabytes of memory alone.

Supercomputer upgrades are nothing new, but it’s always nice to get a little bit of a window into the process, as we’ve been afforded here. And as if upgrading a supercomputer isn’t tricky all by itself, the ability to perform it in place while the machine is running makes it even more of a challenge. There’s a kind of dance between the various teams involved to make it happen. “We want to have the old hardware out at least a week beforehand,” said Bruce Pfaff, who leads Discover’s system administration team, in a statement (PDF link). “But we also want to maximize the amount of time users have with the old system and minimize the period of limited resources during the installation.”

Here’s a general idea of how the process works. First, there’s the planning stage, which requires setting up the rooms with almost a megawatt of power and 400 tons of cooling. System administrators have to wipe data from all of the old hardware before pulling it out, the organization said. Then SGI comes in, positions the racks, connects the power supplies and water cooling pipes, ties up the hundreds of ables, and runs benchmarks to check the hardware.

At this point, the system admins come back, build interconnections with the rest of Discover, and install the OS and software stack. Finally, NCCS benchmarks the total system and tests it for flaws, and loads up an ultra-high-resolution Goddard Earth Observing System Model Version 5 (GEOS-5) simulation. The latter is used as a benchmark as well as for doing real research. In the testing phase, it’s kind of like PCMark 8, except for modeling all of Earth. (The video embedded here shows GEOS-5 running a CO2 simulation on data from the year 2006.)

Once everything is in place, the system will be able to run downscaled climate projections that can drive higher-resolution regional models. The global mode will run at 12km, while the regional model will run at 24, 12, and 4km. The goal is to better predict weather phenomena such as northeast winter storms, mid-continent summer storms, and west coast winter atmospheric rivers, the organization said. NCCS is also more than doubling Discover’s storage, to a total of 33 petabytes. All three of the new SCUs will be online by the end of this month.

As of November 2014, before this upgrade (and just before it was originally announced), TOP500 listed Discover as the 50th-most powerful supercomputer in the world, with its existing 31,000 Xeon cores. It remains to be seen where Discover ends up in the rankings once these upgrades are completed.

Finally, a random aside: Every time I see SGI mentioned, I get a little misty eyed, because the very name used to induce awe and excitement in computer nerds like myself back in the early 1990s. My college had a couple of Silicon Graphics Indigo machines in its lab, and at over $10,000 a pop even then, they were way beyond the reach of any non-professional user. Today, you no longer need specialized PCs for rendering graphics. And over the years, SGI eventually fell from grace and declared bankruptcy — only to be snapped up by Rackable Systems, which promptly assumed the legendary name in 2009. Now it’s selling hardware to NASA. The computer industry is very strange sometimes.

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